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Monday, December 10, 2018

Sailors of the eighteenth century were just as human as the rest of us. That means they had to sleep, eat, drink, and relieve themselves.

Given both the personal and mundane nature of the subject, it isn't surprising that so few people wrote about how sailors, passengers, officers, and enslaved captives disposed of bodily waste. There are almost no references to how sailors 'eased' themselves in their memoirs and journals, and newspapers are similarly silent on the subject. Through archaeology and a few print sources, we can come at a better idea of how they dealt with it. There were four main avenues: the seats of easement or 'head', anywhere sailors damned well pleased, the piss-dale, chamber pots, and tubs. Each of these methods says something about the people who crossed the Atlantic World.

The Seats of Easement

When it comes to answering the call of nature, most people with even a passing interest in maritime history know about 'the head.' Whether tossed into novels as evidence of a hard life at sea, or spoken by a museum docent for a surefire snicker from fifth grade students on a tour, we all pretty much know what to expect.

This most well known of facilities inspired an eighteenth century passenger to verse, and provided Simmons the title of his book: 'Those more vulgar tubes that downward peep, near where the Lion awes the raging deep.'[1] N.A.M. Rodger penned this academic definition of 'the head' in his 2000 edition of The Memoirs of a Seafaring Life: The Narrative of William Spavens:

A triangular platform built over the bows and the base of the bowsprit, where situated the ship's company's latrines.[2]

Notably, Rodger inserted this definition into a glossary that Spavens wrote (and largely plagiarized) to pad out his memoir. Spavens did not include the term originally and probably chose not to both because it was a delicate topic and because the term 'head' was not used specifically in reference to sailors' toilets. I have not yet found a period side that uses the term 'head' in this way. In William Falconer's1769 An Universal Dictionary of the Marine, he does not define 'head' as such nor does he include the facilities in his diagrams.[3]

The lack of a toilet in Falconer's plans for the head are not entirely surprising. Simmons points out that for this period 'in the detailed construction plans available...there is a serious lack of diagrams of the hygienic facilities at the head,' perhaps because shipwrights 'knew how best to fit the facilities of the day to the vessels they built.' He suggested the term 'head' came to mean marine toilets with the rise of steamships in the nineteenth century.[4] Given that, I refer to them as other historians do: seats of easement.

Each one, when one wished to relieve oneself, must hold to the ship's rope with one hand, while with the other, hold one's clothes over one's head and let oneself be splashed by the brine whenever the waves ran high enough.[5]

Such a position would leave sailors and passengers vulnerable to the elements and to their fellow man. As I've written before, resistance was a constant facet of slavery. Guineamen were specifically designed to prevent and fight the frequent revolts on the Middle Passage with barricados, separate apartments for enslaved men, women, and children, and even the placement of the seats of easement. In this illustration of the French slaver la Marie Séraphique you can see a set of seats presumably for the enslaved and another further aft and behind the barricado for the sailors.[6]

The image above emphasizes the sheer number of enslaved people held aboard, and the four holes provided by the seats of easement must have been insufficient. This appears to have been a habitual problem for facilities afloat. Simmons points to the example of the fabled Victory which had 'only six formal sanitary accommodations forward for the roughly eight hundred-man complement of this first-rate.'[7]

Anywhere They Pleased

Given the discomfort, vulnerability, and lack of traditional seats of easement, some sailors avoided them or sought an alternative. In a 1763 case heard before the Maryland Court of Vice Admiralty, two slave ship seamen swore against their captain, who beat a sailor 'for pissing out of the gun hole.'[8] In William Wiliams' semi-autobiographical novel Mr. Penrose: Mr. Penrose: The Journal of Penrose, Seaman, he wrote of a fight between Spanish sailors and their English prisoners. He later learned it was caused by careless urination:

In the foretop was a small Hurricane house for the Captain of the Top to sleep in. In this place was a Model of a Ship, in which some of our people through laziness watered. Unfortunately for us she had a small hole in her bottom, and the urine ran down on the Hoopsticks as they were at prayers. But the whole things blew over next day as we all declared none intended it as an insult.[9]

Regulations would never be enough to prevent the filthy conditions that a group of young hypermasculine men could degrade to. In 1798, Aaron Thomas wrote in his journal about an improvised piss-dale: "Asked the cause of the Speaking Trumpet smelling so strong, said it was caused, by reason that Leiutenant...... had been using it, as a Pissing Machine to carry his Urine from his body, off the Quarter Deck, through one of the Ports, into the Sea."[11]

The Piss-Dale

A simple metal urinal, the piss-dale was such an integral part of sailors' lives that Edward Ward chose to include it on the very first page of his description of common sailors in the satirical The Wooden World Dissected:

He crawls upon the deck, to the piss-dale, where, while he manages his whip-staff with one hand, he scratches his poop with the other.[12]

The piss-dale was located near the ladder to the quarterdeck, as illustrated in the widely reproduced 1728 engraving 'A Ship of War of the Third Rate'[13]:

Being made of metal, a handful of these have survived to be excavated by maritime archaeologists.

Piss-dale from the Invincible, 1758 [14]

Piss-dale from the Henrietta Marie, 1700 [15]

Piss-dale from an unknown wreck [16]

Chamber Pots

Numerous wrecks of the eighteenth century turn up chamber pots. In the archaeological report of the Swift, a sloop that wrecked in 1770 off Argentina, archaeologists stated 'three ceramic chamber-pots were found prior to the intervention of the PROAS team, and so have no provenance. But since chamber-pots were not used by ordinary seamen, it is very probable that they belonged to officers.'Chamber pots are very common artifacts from the eighteenth century, found at pretty much every major domestic site. The archaeologists found 'there are clear differences in quality between the three pots: one is plain and coarsely-made, another is plain but of high-quality creamware, and the third is salt-glazed with relief decoration in blue, and probably imported from the Westerwald district of the Rhineland (cf. Hume 1982: 280–1).'[17]

Simmons also concluded that sailors were less likely to use chamber pots:

According to the technologies of a particular period, easily portable collection containers of wood Chamber pots were probably employed more often by officers and privileged passengers than by members of the crew, who used the cruder forms of collection containers.[18]

The number of surviving chamber pots in eighteenth century shipwrecks supports these conclusions. Though a relatively small vessel, the Swift boasted a crew of 125 officers, men, and marines when she was commissioned in 1763.[19] Were chamber pots a more common mode, we would expect to see more than three for such a crew.

Chamber pot from Invincible, 1758 [20]

The idea that chamber pots were primarily for the officers is reinforced by the excavation of the 1758 Invincible wreck. As a seventy four gun ship of the line on active service, she boasted between 650-700 officers, men, and marines.[21] John H. Bingeman isn't entirely clear in his The First Invincible (1747-1758): Her Excavations (1980-1991), but it appears this chamber pot alone was found among the wreckage.[22]

I found no reference to chamber pots in reports of the privateer Defence, gunboat Philadelphia, or sloop Boscawen.[23] All of these are small ships of war operating in American waters.

Merchantmen also carried chamber pots for personal use. In the excavation of an unidentified late eighteenth century merchantman off Lewes, Delaware 'at least two chamber pots' were recovered.[24] In the mingled 1788 wrecks of the French Boussole and Astrolabe another chamber pot was excavated.[25]

Any treatment of chamber pots in archaeological wrecks for my period of study would be incomplete if I failed to include the strange and unique use of chamber pots on the General Carletonwreck of 1785. Joanna Dąbal wrote:

Those discovered on the wreck were most probably not used for their standard purpose. Their number (eleven in total), as well as traces of usage in the form of numerous scratches on the inside and soot stains on the outside of the vessels suggest that they were used in the preparation and consumption of meals on the ship (Fig. 6).[26]

Tubs

By the Middle Ages, wooden tubs were used to store human waste afloat. Simmons defined one method of tubs, and one that draws an uncomfortable similarity to the chamber pots of the General Carleton:

Steep-tubs were wooden barrels, and half-barrels, generally understood to have been used to steep, or humidity and partly desalinate, salted meats - a staple for crews of sailing ships from at least the fourteenth century to well into the nineteenth century. An alternative has been suggested as well: that of external sanitary accommodations.[27]

Beginning in the early seventeenth century, tubs were gradually phased out for sailors and passengers as toilets with the rise of alternate and more sanitary means.[28]

Among enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage, tubs continued to be the main depository of human waste. With the exception of chamber pots, other accommodations were constructed so that they would swiftly carry waste out of the ship and drop it into the sea. Tubs were vessels of collection, and contributed to the horror of the slave ship. Olaudah Equiano remembered his survival of the Middle Passage in his Interesting Narrative:

The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. The wretched situation was again aggravated by the chains, now unsupportable, and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.[29]

Former slave ship captain turned abolitionist John Newton testified before Parliament against the slave trade. When he remarked that slave ships could be 'uncomfortable' below decks, a politician asked him 'In what respect chiefly does it deserve this epithet?' Newton echoed the atmosphere Equiano conjured in his book, and also emphasized the role of necessary tubs in the suffering of enslaved people:

Their being kept constantly in irons; crowded in their lodging; and often in bad weather, almost destitute of air to breathe; besides what they suffer from the ship's motion in their irons, and the difficulty in the night of getting to their tubs, which are sometimes overset.[30]

Marcus Rediker argued in his The Slave Ship: A Human History that Guineamen were constructed both for the physical task of transporting African captives to the New World, but also to transform those human beings into commodities.[31] Part of this was subjecting them to a dehumanizing terror, and the use of necessary tubs rather than more effective means of waste disposal may have been part of that.

By studying universal aspects of the human conditions, we can explore the past. Looking at what we eat and how, the ways we grieve over death, how we sleep, and even how we dispose of bodily waste, it is possible to draw conclusions about class, race, labor, and culture. Seats of easement are simple proof of the danger and discomfort of life at sea. The paucity of chamber pots touches on divisions between officers and men (permeable though that barrier may have been). The continued use of tubs on slavers illustrates how very different that trade was from the rest of the merchant and naval maritime world, and how integral suffering was to the slave trade.